zzzahara

Zzzahara’s latest album came to them in a dream. Despite being born and raised in Los Angeles, Zahara had never really gotten into David Lynch. When he died at the start of 2025, they dove into his archive of films and interviews. “He's so weird,” they laugh. “Always talking about how ‘everything's a dream!’ And you know what? At that moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I dreamed. I thought, that’s fucked up. So I started taking magnesium and shit, trying to see what it was like to dream again.”

The ensuing dreams were heavy and strange. In one of them, Zzzahara was a teenager, drifting through space and telling their brother, who passed away when they were 12, about their life. “He was asking, like, do you remember me? It really fucked me up.”

Their fourth album Distant Lands was born from the idea of communing with their brother; “talking to him about all aspects of my life across a long period of time.” The name comes from the sense that they exist, now, in different worlds – touching from a distance, as Ian Curtis would have it. It also references disconnected headspace Zzzahara was in when they were taking opiates in their early-twenties. “I would often feel like I was off in a different world, a dream world, blacked out and trying to connect to something that's not there.”